Philosophy of art, the beautiful and the sublime. Feel free to post links to essays, articles of interest, or questions and thoughts to generate discussion. Let's all try to keep the quality of our submissions and discussions at DepthHub-worthy level, please.

Note: If you submit a link, particularly if it is to an article of a fairly general nature, a comment briefly explaining your reason for posting or responding to the article would be greatly appreciated.

i might be off here, but it seems like you are looking at the difference between objective and subjective truth. Objective is saying that beauty is in the object, subjective is saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder. if you're looking deeper philosophically, you might also want to peak at a priori/a posteriori truths, or necessary truths in general.

my background is theatre, so my first instinct is to recommend the Poetics by Aristotle. in this work (which is only about 100 pages if i recall) Aristotle sets out to define an objective criteria for art. This is written about drama, but can be interpreted across all forms of art. (if you are looking for beauty in a strict sense, as opposed to say quality, or overall goodness, then i got nothing for you).

I think the fact of the matter is there aren't very many things that are "beauty" without preconception. With the exception of maybe titties (newborn babies crawl toward them) or faces (newborn babies can recognize eyes), most perception of beauty (even to toddlers) is socially formed.